


Queens of Omega

by alephthirteen



Series: Unmapped Relays [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: A Hive of Scum and Villiany, Adopted Little Blue Babies, Ardat-Yakshi, Asari Political Issues, Being the Daughter of a SPECTRE and the Shadow Broker Opens Up Doors, Engineers, F/F, F/M, Liara is Patient About It, Like Ruling the Unruly Parts of the Galaxy, Pirates, Plus Their Biological Kid Sisters, Post-Ending, Prothean Survivors, Retired Aria T'Loak, Shepard Tells "Dad" Jokes, Strippers, Synthesis Ending, Terminus Systems, The Couch is a Character, The Trouble The T'Soni Sisters Get Up To, With Iron Fist and Velvet Glove, art curators, smugglers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:20:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26962024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: "I don't fucking like it, kids."Artemis drums her fingers on her beloved, often-rebuilt Claymore.  Syane yawns, clacking her fangs."You don't have to.  The citadel is offering you a full pardon and we've mapped a small pocket past the Omega-4.  Drones are building a station."Tevos rests her hand on her bondmate's arm.  Aria's hand drops to Tevos' taut, stretched-out belly, and strokes it.Some pirate lord."My love, there's nowhere else safe to retire.  Twins are a blessing, my love."Jaw set and teeth clenched, T'loak finally relents."I'm going to visit.  V-I-fucking-P treatment when I do.""Naturally," Syane chortles.Artemis places a hand on the mobster's shoulder."And don't worry.  There's only one rule on Omega.  Don't replace the couch."-----"This is like outer Armali," Arty mutters."More stripper boots though..." her sister jokes."Well," Nyra sighs.  "Do we just break into an apartment or..."Arty taps her omnitool, sliding Aria's command-code chip into the reader."Penthouses," she says, pointing to a heavily-armored building above Purgatory.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni, Original Asari Character(s)/Original Asari Character(s), Original Asari Character(s)/Original Female Krogan Character(s), Original Asari Character(s)/Original Non-Human Character(s), Tevos/Aria T'Loak
Series: Unmapped Relays [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1967521
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	1. Previously on...

**Author's Note:**

> **BIOTIC TERMS:**
> 
> Charge - A short-range faster than light 'dash attack' used by biotic shock troopers to close several hundred feet of distance faster than their enemies can possibly perceive. A charge terminates in a shockwave at the exit point that stuns all but the heaviest organic enemies and most soldiers follow it up with either a sedative stim or a point-blank execution with a shotgun.
> 
> Lash - A modified 'throw' attack concentrated into a whip-like coil laced with a small amount of warpfield. Though capable of burning through flesh at full power, more commonly used at a fraction of full power by police for crowd control and in some rare cases, professional dominatrixes in bondage scenes.
> 
> Warp - A localized, intense disruption of gravity and atomic integrity which a biotic can deliver on a small area. This breaks down armor's molecules, damages organic tissue and strains kinetic barriers.
> 
> "Warpfire" - A term for the blue-white aurora the warp field effect gives off in the visible spectrum. It is the energy that has dissipated enough to escape the warp field and is not harmful. It is also known to occur as part of an eezo-release reflex during sexual melding, physical stimulation and caresses of erogenous zones, whether in Asari-Asari sexual encounters or by Asari and non-Asari partners where the partner of the human, Krogan, Turian or other biotic-compatible species has sufficient eezo levels and biotic skill.
> 
>  **EQUIPMENT:**  
>  Acolyte - A unique Asari pistol whose manufacturing rights were originally given exclusively given to the Justicar order and was later released to the commandos. Unlike typical metal-slug weapons, it fires eezo-ceramic rounds capable of generating microsingularites on impact. The eezo content means that they can be manipulated with the wearer's biotics.
> 
> Carnifex - A popular heavy pistol favored by mercenaries.
> 
> Claymore - A Krogan-made ultra-heavy shotgun popularized during the Reaper War via its use by elite human soldiers and N7s, including Shepard. Its extreme recoil means it is not safe for non-augmented or non-cyborg humans to fire except if they are wearing powered armor. The wide barrel and per-shot capacity means that unlike most shotguns it can be made to use explosive, thermal or eezo-infused ammunition.
> 
> Disciple - A companion design to the Acolyte, these unique weapons were originally handcrafted by Justicars as a rite of passage. Though their possession by non-Justicars is still a criminal offense on most planets, their release to commandos was a wartime necessity and the crime is unenforceable.
> 
> They fire a narrow sphere of explosive submunitions which orbit the gravity well of a larger, eezo-bearing round and detonate after impact. This unique pattern makes them accurate at longer ranges since the shot orbits the central projectile which tracks a traditional pistol or rifle-like trajectory and as such, does not spread. The central round dissolves into a warp field on impact, drawing in the explosives towards the already-weakened molecules of the target.
> 
> **ASARI CULTURAL NOTES:**
> 
> Neural melding is not an inherently sexual act for the Asari.
> 
> Platonic melds are common and while not undertaken with strangers, are daily or near-daily with family. Family members may use them to comfort each other or share a memory of a funny thing that happened during the day. Siblings use them from toddler age onward to comfort each other, plot against their parents, and so on.
> 
> Sexual melding is more prolonged, vastly more intense, and results in a complete loss of the sense of self into a shared subconscious and sensory space. The desire to meld sexually first appears in early puberty, often as a migraine-like pressure behind the eyes after waking from sexually explicit dreams. Sometimes referred to as 'dawn-pain' or various, less polite terms. 
> 
> Physical sexual arousal without melding leads to this tension which builds gradually until a meld is made.
> 
> Being forbidden to meld is one of the worst aspects of being an Ardat-Yakshi, enforcing a level of emotional isolation that defies description in human terms. Their lives are lived alone while their friend and family spend time inside each other's heads.
> 
> Adult asari have sufficient control to limit how deep they dive and can choose to skim, telling a story, float on the surface, preventing conception, or go deep, mapping and creating a child. Contraceptives exist in the form of euphoric drugs that mimic post-meld afterglow and reduce the urge.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A review of the college years of the T'Soni twins pulled from the other entry in the universe: "Roll to Seduce"

###  **T** HESE EXCERPTS FROM _"ROLE TO SECUDE"_ OFFER A QUICK REVIEW OF THE COLLEGE YEARS FOR THE T'SONI GIRLS **  
(see "Roll to Seduce" for a larger, crossover cast and more about Shepard and Liara's marriage)  
  
**

* * *

**  
  
  
  
Artemis T'Soni | August 2244**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

The vid link crackles to life and Artemis' head snaps up, blinking away the sudden burst of light.

"Huh?" she groans.

Her mouth is sour and tacky and her crests hurt worse than the time when she caught herself nearly melding with a girl on the first date in the back of a ruined car on a human colony and banged her head into a concrete wall in surprise.

If an Asari could get a hangover, she'd blame that. They can't...not in this sense. Shep will 'clock it' immediately, snapping into a set of postures, movements, and tones of voice that she doesn't even know she has. Buried too deep. At the first hint that something's wrong, she'll dig into the mix of training and thoroughbred instincts that it takes for a human soldier plus one former archaeologist with limited social skills to waltz through ruins that commando teams died in. 

Forgetting how it works and recognizing _human_ alcohol poisoning symptoms, Shep will ask if she's been drinking.

That's when Liara will chime in, reminding her that's not quite how hangovers are _'honey'_ and telling that story about Solstice. Before spotting one of her own bad habits and crashing down on it with a lecture so unstoppable it might as well be the Reapers...except they _could be_ stopped in the final estimation.

Answer. Admit she hasn't had a bite or a drink of water in four days, be surrounded by a literal army of 'aunties' of four different species and overprotective 'uncles' of two others by the second sunset. 

That's Good Plan.

Bad Plan is not to answer. Bad Plan involves either official (Shep) or unofficial (Liara) investigations into her entire life here and either polite, uniformed and obvious bodyguards (Shep) or incredibly sketchy but mostly invisible shadows (Liara) until they're convinced she's safe.

Maybe even Uncle Wrex visiting.

_Aunt Karin is going to kill me when she hears...hopefully._

She asked her mothers for one gift when she went to college. They did _not_ disappoint, even if a handheld QEC connection was as much for them as for her. The quality is shit but what's important is it's instant. If Liara gasps, or groans, or rolls her eyes at Shep as an image _here_ in her hand, the other half did so at that exact moment most of a galaxy away. It's monochrome. Grayish-white and scratchy, hideous resolution compared to anything commercial. Officially, it probably doesn't exist and judging by the mix of stout Quarian plating and clearly Geth-inspired fluidic power connectors, it wouldn't have existed before the war.

They just stare at each other for a while. It hurts. She's here. She's following in the footsteps when she could be back home, reading, wearing dirty clothes because she forgot to change them not because she apparently picked up the human habit of going to college without learning how to _wash one's own clothing_ and if it feels like she's a half-trainable pyjak, she probably deserves it.

She fumbles for the answer button.

"Hi, moms."

"Hi, little lamb."

"Hi, little one," Liara adds. She'll never be 'little wing' and Arty knows this. She's not sure she wants to be. Not with the way her mother deflates whenever she says it.

"Moms? Mom and dad? You never told me. Which is it?"

"Mom and dad's good," Shepard tells her. "I...heh. Even then I thought about being happy, daydreamed about it, I never exactly thought _dad_ would be an exactly appropriate term for me. I mean, we puny earth lesbians usually adopt or I guess the rich use fertility clinics so..."

"Hey!" Artemis complains. "I'm adopted!"

"Yeah. Even that would typically be 'other mom' but I spotted you in the wreckage. Initiating mother or as humans call it 'dad' so yeah, dibs."

Liara shoots her wife a look that truly belongs in a hall of fame somewhere.

"Dibs? She's not yours, she's _ours_ , you towering twat!"

Liara's halfhearted slap lands even lighter and less convincingly than her Irish accent by osmosis or the curses that come with it. Forty years on, Liara learned to curse without blushing.

"Remind me. Which one of us took a crash course of _hormone treatments_ to nurse her?"

"Right," Shepard says, pointing a finger at Liara on the transmission. 

"Mom stuff," she whispers.

"Remind me," her mother says with acidic calm and a stiff thumb to her own temple to push some building headache back in. "Which one of us had to split battlefield reports and _breastfeeding_ in the last seven weeks? Which one of us saw the damage report and t-t-thought I was alo-"

Liara's throat trembles and locks up. Shepard is all over her, gathering her up and pressing her cheek against Liara's neck folds.

"Shh. Li, no no no. Never. I'll always come back. I'm here. I'm always going to be here. You saved her. We did good."

"So, shall we put mom and dad in the minutes and go from there?" Arty jokes.

"Yes," Liara sniffs. "Heh. She tells your jokes. Unfortunately. Thank you for letting your mother make a fool of herself, Artemis."

"Anytime."

"How are you settling in?" Shep asks.

Arty turns the device in her hands to show off the room. Serrice would've taken her in a split second. Serrice would probably have offered her a matriarch daughter's hand in marriage if it got the name T'Soni back into their notable students list. Serrice would probably kill people to make sure she left with a perfect grade average and a desire to work with the recruiting board of the alumni. Neither her mothers nor Arty wanted that. Armali are Serrice's main cultural, academic and political rivals. Most importantly, their loathed waveball rivals.

Here, she's famous for her last name but not on an easy path because of it.

"Untidy," she admits.

"That's adorable," Shepard chortles. "That's beyond tidy, honey. For civilian life, it's damn near surgical."

"Wait, what? This looks _noth-_ "

Liara laughs softly.

"Nothing like the room of a woman who in thirteen years barely used anything but the desk?" she jokes. "If you'd ever seen my room at Serrice, you'd assume it was simply unoccupied. At least if I had the study pod folded up"

"Or dad's," Arty mumbles.

"Dad's picture, if you're thinking of the one I am? That is from an _inspection_ of the barracks, little lamb. Final stages officer qualifications, I think. My grade on that exam was entirely based on the tidy."

Shepard laughs so hard Liara swats her again. Unbecoming a matriarch, let alone a T'Soni and exactly how human couples married sixty years act and so _them_ it makes Artemis' ribs ache.

"Human soldiers are big on ceremony. It makes us feel important, I suppose."

Liara scoffs.

"And commandos skip ceremony because each one in training back home probably spends more time fucking than most human armies did," Liara grumbles. "Do _not_ date a commando, sweetling."

"What, don't make your mistake?" Shep asks.

The unbreakable woman looks shattered at the merest hint that Liara regrets anything.

"You're human, darling. Doesn't count...and no, not you. Twenty, no...close to thirty years before I met you. She was older and I was too young, really, for anything with a partner. Let alone an older partner like her. Nezzy caught us and sent me back to my room. Suppose she gave the poor thing one look that had her scrambling for one-way passage to Omega. Given that it wasn't much as sex went, never again. I'd resigned myself to being a lone fish when I met you."

"I promise, mom. No commandos. No _archaeologists_. No one scary."

Shep laughs. Loud, honest, real. The sound that terrifies Thessian aristocrats because they _need her_ and they _owe her_ and she's _looked up_ to and one doesn't live a thousand years without being able to smell the winds of change.

"S'fair. Archaeologists scare me," she whispers. 

"Funny you say that about the commandos, Li. I hadn't thought of that. Though I suppose that for most of human history, it's usually the civilian women in the area the army swept through that got fucked senseless and, I'm afraid, not usually by choice. At least the asari had the common sense to evolve only one gender so that pent-up soldiers didn't see civilians as a different animal when they encountered them."

Liara rolls her eyes.

"More a matter of the asari are better at self-defense when naked and the meld means any pain in is shared. Rape isn't likely if you feel the hurt it's inflicting..."

_They're just...talking. They didn't call to ask anything in particular._

"You just called over dinner, didn't you?" Artemis laughs. "This is just like two days ago. Just with me here rather than there in person."

"Busted."

"Shadow Broker's daughter indeed," Liara purrs.

The door behind her bangs open and a hum and a chorus of voices spills into the room along with light from the hallway. A twang like a steel lyre-string that indicates air rushing into the gap that a biotic move emptied echos around the room and is followed by disappointed groans.

"Hi, Syane. You all right sis?"

"Yes, thank the goddess," Syane groans, sinking to the carpet. "THESE GIRLS ARE INSANE!"

"Go sit with your sister, please, little lamb."

"Sure."

Artemis kneels down and holds the QEC between them. Syane's eyes are wide, wet and glassy. 

"Why didn't you tell me, mother?" Syane moans.

"Tell you what? Oh."

Liara sighs.

"Did they pressure you because you're Prothean? Honestly, I don't think that more than six people know what Protheans looked like. No statues left. We raised you, you're ours. We treated you as asari and human and just loved you," she admits. "Never really thought about it. I..."

Their mother sighs.

"I suppose that we thought you would just seem novel to the other girls there. Not so much that they would be rude about it. Part of the college maiden experience, my dears."

"Being novel," Syane groans. "Especially _genetically_ novel, from a rare species, is a bad thing to be in the dorms during a hormone suppressant shortage. The whole pack of them came up to me after class, just humming with biotics. Flirting, laughing, not really pressuring, I suppose. Just being right in my space. Three of them tailed me home despite all of your best tricks for losing a tail and a couple of my own. They all lived here in our dorm though. Tiny bit less creepy. I don't actually think they knew I was Prothean, just that I was different than their other partners. Whether or not I was the last one in the package, they wanted a bite."

"Ouch," Shep mutters. "Pharma-bot software failure is one thing but it's been sixty years. It's the _homeworld_ and this is a key medical and mental health need. To get to the point of widespread _withdrawal_? Kickback sickness? We'd heard it was bad..."

_They worried I'd run out, they mean._

Liara rushes into the gap before Artemis can feel too judged.

"Artemis, we don't me-"

"Why do you think I've attended all my classes _virtually_ so far?" Arty grumbles. "I've got enough for my whole study here but, still. Don't want someone thinking with her azure and trying to start a meld and me having to use a throw to keep her back."

"It's okay, mom. You're allowed to worry about that. I'm a suppressed Ardat-Yakshi and we need to get used to saying it without blushing. I'm not scared of that part of me."

"Doctor T'van is optimistic about the new implants, and the new drugs, and hell, some kind of weird biofeedback gloves she had been drawing on a scratchpad at my last visit. The Justicar they assigned is younger than I am and she's watching me like a hawk but she hasn't done anything because I haven't. She hasn't even tightened up to where I can catch her tail. She _thinks._ If she looks like she's tightening the noose, I'll bug out and come home. Of all the bad things that could have happened to me for being your daughter, genetic or otherwise, I'll take the goddess-fucked Ardat chromosomes any day."

Two big, soft, damp hands curl around her wrists. Four eyes seek out hers, yellow and damp and _pleading_ and Goddess it is somehow worse than being pouted at with just two, Shepard's right.

"Please," Syane pleads. "I need to read, meld, whatever you want to call it. Be outside my head. With anyone but _them_."

Artemis glances, panicked, at her mother and father.

"Sis, I might..."

"Hurt me?" Syane scoffs. "Doubt it. The fact that my ancestors were here messing around with your ancestor's tribes back when Ardats were vastly more common suggested they probably had it cracked. I'll just give you a dark energy nudge if it burns, sound good?"

Her left hand darkens from pale green to jet black and the air snap-freezes around her disruption field.

"Just," Syane sniffs. "I want to be normal. I want to have had a bad day and my twin sister melds for a while so I can experience her day. Live through half of a _good day._ Please."

Shepard nods.

"You're careful and your sister's tough. You've play-melded with her who knows how many times when you were little. Before we even had a diagnosis. You won't hurt her. You can't. You wouldn't even know how to, little lamb."

Arty exhales.

"Right, Sy. So...yeah. Let's...hmm. I want to make sure you have that hand up, on my throat. Just in case. I'm just going to hold your head, ok?"

"Yeah," Sy whispers. "At the flare, like when we were kids. Please."

"Can you leave it on, little lamb? So we can see both our girls?" Shepard pleads.

* * *

**Artemis T'Soni | November 2249**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

_Fuck,_ Arty thinks. _Stupid QEC._

She wonders if it has an audio-only mode and then realizes if it ever did, Liara rigged an override.

"S'okay, gorgeous," Melissa mumbles. "Answer it."

The blonde human's small arm is thrown over her middle is light and warm. It feels fluffy with that uniquely-human quality of _hair_ and it's been six hours after the lifting of legal bans on Ardats having sex and five of those have been spent in her classmate's arms. She's confident on the face and it's Calculus 18 or Xenocultural Arts 67. It's either a math or art course, she's pretty sure.

Goddess, it was _her turn_ after fifteen years of nudging aside suitors of every race except Asari, plus some who hadn't divined or heard the rumors. Not to mention those more interested in a roll in the sheets than marrying into the Peeresses. She's almost sixty-five, quite young for the old rules but now? That's well past the age for that first stupid, laugh-it-off attempt. Lots of opinion writers call it a bad influence. A byproduct of the short-lived, high-energy humans. They don't acknowledge that this means Asari culture adjusted to humanity and human intermarriage in a way it didn't for Salarains or Vorcha who they've known for centuries longer and who don't even live a fourth as long as a human.

"Hi, mom and dad."

"Well!" Shep chortles. "I was just calling to ask how you were handling the announcement but, seemingly you're handling it well."

"Or, just dad, apparently. Hi."

"Who's the girl?" her dad jokes.

"Melissa."

"Melanie, actually," the girl behind her yawns. 

_Shit, really?_

"Hi, female voice calling itself dad I can't see! I'm behaving, promise!"

She waves.

"The hand you can't see is totally not hiding because it's on a boob!"

"She's funny, I like her."

"Good lord," Melanie mumbles. "Someone ought to win a bloody Nobel Prize for putting you lot back on the field."

"You lot?" Shepard inquires, stiffening a bit.

"Ardat, right?" Melanie asks after a yawn. "I hoped when we met at the club. About the time the orgasm ripped my brain into confetti and it felt like I died but somehow I wasn't scared since she had me and I knew I hadn't? I was sure."

Melanie chuckles and snuggles in closer, wrapping a hand around Arty's breast that feels less welcome than it did an hour ago.

"So you didn't know who I was? Remember the class we're in?"

"Does it matter? You're cute. You're different. _Smell_ dangerous, at least. I like different and I live for that sort of fake danger stuff. Used to be really into vampire books as a girl. You are an Ardat, right? I mean, hell, given how good you are I wouldn't care but...that was my guess when I saw you."

_Wanting my last name, that's something. Not great, not nothing either. Wanting an Ardat? Going out looking for an Ardat as the key trait? The fuck is her damage?_

What follows that thought is a whirlwind. Arty doesn't remember most of it. 

The yelling? Begging? That was Melanie. 

The stony, flat tone, telling Melanie to get out of her sight? That must have been her dad.

Meaning she's the one who did the crying.

\-----

"What the fuck just happened, dad?" Artemis finally croaks.

If there was a day-night cycle on that wacky space station her mom settled the family in, it's probably gone full circle while Shep stayed her, patient as could be, listening to her sobs.

"Whew," Shep exhales. "Kind of a rite of passage, for human lesbians."

Arty sniffs.

"When she's on my case about this sort of thing, Mom always says I'm the bluest human dyke who ever lived. Do tell."

"She only does that because she can't help with gaydar and labels," Shep reminds her. "Not because she judges you. She put aside a marriage fund before _Normandy_ made the relay to the forward staging point. She put it in your name with one hand she held you in the other. Tripled the input when you were diagnosed. She's proud of you, including the fact that you maybe carry yourself more like Aria T'loak or me and maybe are going to get married in a suit, not a dress."

"For your mom, it's a blind spot. Try and remember that by the time she knew that human women existed, humans were already self-sorting, especially queer women. The ones making a point of being in Asari circles _were_ the queer ones and if they weren't looking for partners, they were looking for the atmosphere, or to raise kids in female spaces...which, you were very kind to let us gender-crazy humans assume that. Very patient in waiting so long to be irritated. I'm not stereotyping there."

"Two years in to my tour as a Lieutenant and just after general resettlement options opened for Thessia and Illium, I processed three discharge papers for ladies in my unit in one month. Saw an exit code I didn't recognize, called a fleet clerk. Took a while but she found hundreds more. The slot on the form was marked other and the other field was filled in the same. I concerned a marine and learned that Mike-Tango-Tango-Foxtrot-Sierra stood for Moving to Thessia for Sex."

"Human women are truly efficient," Arty teases. "That saves about three dozen letters."

"We don't live long and queers don't really get to _live_ until twice as old as most folks unless their family wraps them in so much love they do all the stupid teenager stuff _as a teenager_ so yeah, we are in a hurry."

"Even if Liara had friends back then, they would have been asari or else humans else soaking up the atmosphere. Living with you blue angels, your amusing lack of labels, and the less tightly wound ask-and-answer flirting style? Where two women holding hands isn't just normal, it's in every piece of ancient art? I can't really tell you how much it affected me, Arty. It was in a vid but when I saw the Hall of Matriarchs, all those portraits? Saw who built that civilization? Who loved them?"

Arty watches her father's smile grow slowly, like a seed becoming a plant.

"I knew that it was where I'd belong. Where I'd live when I was discharged. Where I'd be buried, someday. Plan was to get married to someone woman-shaped at some point the middle, human or alien, wasn't sure about that detail at the time. So I doubt any of the religious haters pulled up roots to move to Thessia or hell, even the Citadel. There are straight women in Asari space but they're the ones willing to be there. On the Citadel it made the news back when if C-Sec got involved because someone lost their shit and threw a punch about being approached."

The next, unshared memory brings a laugh and somehow is so inappropriate that Artemis isn't "old enough" for it.

"Anyhow. Melanie was a Mark I ESG, as we navy dykes called them. Experimenting Straight Girl. It's a nearly universal experience for Earth lesbians."

"My what?"

"Oh, that's when a girl likes you but not _you,_ just the _idea_ of being gay. It's actually really common in college, which is the age you're at. She's away from her parents, she thinks she might be gay or bicurious and wants to make sure she is. Or make sure she is not, really. Typically goes that way. She wants to try the identity on like it's a hat because she thinks can take it back off later. You can't. She keys in on your openness about your sexuality. Saves her time to pick someone she's confident is lesbian. There are humans who don't have that experience I suppose but...

"I'm so sorry you had to go through it. You tend to be naked and happy and thinking about the L word and the girl who made you that way is in a completely different headspace. Even panicking. It hurts like hell, my girl."

"So she probably is queer but wanted me in particular because I fit some fantasy. Like I wasn't a _person,_ " Arty moans.

"Yeah, sorry. Not an exact match but closest I can think of. Not seeing you as a whole-ass person is kind of the essence of it, kiddo. Shame. I'm guessing if she remembered you from class, or even wanted the fame thing..."

Shep trails off so Arty can think.

"...I'd have been okay. At least been okay with starting out there."

Shep nods.

"Dad? Who was yours? Not mom, clearly. Kenzi?"

_Mom wouldn't be so torn up about it that she has a scrubber on her omnitool removing 'Mackenzie' from news article bylines._

Shep chuckles.

"No, not Kenzi. That was real, even if it ended badly. Ashley. Not _the Ashley,_ not Aunt Ashley but a different Ashley. From back in Officer Candidate School. Ashley Williamson."

"You and mom really just need to make friends with different names slash initials someday."

"Yeah, I know we do. Karen's a gimme. Lots of women named Karen with an E rather than an I like Chakwas. I know a Rex, a Tali--that's with a Y--and three Samanthas and hell, I know a person who's _first_ name is Traynor. Just in the humans. In those who aren't family. Which is kooky now that I put it together. Get some rest, little lamb. There will be another. Who wants the whole of Artemis Benezia T'Soni."

"Thanks mom."

"I said rest, little lamb. ESGs tire you out."

"Baa," Arty jokes.

"Baa..."

* * *

**Artemis T'Soni | May 2250**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Tescani continent, sub-polar forests**

**Underwater Dig Site, continental shelf**

(168 meters below sea level, 20 meters from shore)

The water is cold, clear, dark and for every bubble coming up from the half-frozen seabed, there's a northern tribal myth to go with it.

Syane's communicator bracelet blinks and she pushes the acknowledge symbol. "This theory of yours is crazy, sis."

Arty's synthesized voice in her ear is accompanied by her effortless-looking approach. 

Her face is sealed up reflexively, just as it would be in vacuum or near-vacuum and she's been taking brief sips from her breather. Her pupils are blown out and she's been catching things that Syane can't spot without the night-vision visor. 

Were it not for the glucose coming off the bed of thermo-synthetic plankton below them, this salty-sweet water would have been ice an eternity ago. Even for Protehan physiology, long honed as predators and genetically enhanced for thousands of years to be killers, it's truly punishing. Arty looks so at ease that she's probably figuring out how to take her mousy little civil engineer girlfriend down here and fuck her against the rock shelf for a lark. How the asari ever convinced anyone that they _weren't_ descended from aquatic hunters in ancient times, she has no idea. Give that it escaped the Prothean records her mother shared from the expedition to Thessia, they've been convincing liars for a long time.

Syane taps a reply back, then freezes.

Right there. Right in the rock.

Syane smiles and some primitive fish sees _teeth_ and doesn't care what planet the owner was bred on, scurrying away into a crevice.

She flicks her light at it to indicate it to her sister. Following a brief scan of the weed-covered door, she takes out an omnigel dispenser and works on dissolving the seal. With a gentle pull field, it comes out clean and Arty helps her maneuver it into a safe flat spot on the rocks.

Inside the cave is air, bioluminescent fungus and _raw cold_ that has new features like drafts and shifting air currents that make the ocean seem mild.

"Underwater tombs prove nothing," Arty grumbles. "Other than that I should never have let Uncle Wrex talk us into the _Indiana Jones_ vids."

"Because everyone knows that Lake Bisel is where the sword of the first Justicar was buried," Syane scoffs. "And common knowledge and six thousand years of searching and finding nothing mean it just has to be a tiny bit deeper."

"No, because the myths of Malari Canon are the propaganda of fascist lunatics. Not to mention we're nine leaps of faith past those."

"Fascists usually steal their myths for their propaganda. Less work. Earth's Nazis stole Norse themes, for example."

"That seems a stretch to generalize from that to here."

"Humor me, sis. So the Malari Canon glorifies Ardat-Yakshis, assigns them mythical status. Generals. Sorceresses. Death goddesses, practically. A fascist regime from the _equator_ celebrates a genetic anomaly more common, even slightly, here, in the _polar_ populations. Why?"

"Again, propaganda. Dark legend. Do what the secret police says or the witch from the cold water place is going to rip your brain out through your azure."

"But why _that_ and not their empresses? Not their actual bloodlines? Why would egotists and eugenics freaks lionize infertile killers? Sorry, no offense."

Arty shrugs.

"In this case, none taken."

Syane taps her fingers to the wall, just below a pictograph. One female standing over a kneeling crowd.

"Because they were useful, sis. This matches a script we have in some old Justicar records captured from a Malari stronghold. Walk with me. Tell me what you see."

"Queen, over her subjects. She's maiden and they're matron stage, by the shapes."

"Queen, standing over a mass grave."

"Queen, using magic to defeat a monster."

Syane looks back along the short hallway.

"What I see, is this: Ardat priestess, performing rites. Sacrifices. Lives being given by women who already had borne children. Same priestess, infused with repeated feeding using it to mimic implant-level biotics and slaying a... Goddess! Is that a _thresher maw?_ "

She nods at the monster inscribed. Arty leans closer.

"Fuck. Yeah, must be. The eggs can survive vacuum, cold and a solid impact. Asteroid strike might have knocked one loose from Tuchanka and onto a rogue planetoid. Maws are old enough as a species and Tuchanka is close enough to us in space that one could have drifted on a rock that got sling-shotted for some extra speed."

"Huh," Syana mutters. "Might be why the pedipalps are bigger but there's four and not three. Let's send that one to Wrex."

Artemis chuckles and sets up the higher-resolution scanner to map the complex.

"How big?" Syane asks.

"Not tomb big," Arty murmurs. "This place is _palace_ big. That," she points at the display. "Off to the north. Might be barracks. Or a pantry. Hard to say purpose from outlines. Bedchambers, or else that's the burial chamber. Way too many empty rooms to make sense."

"Told ya."

"This theory of yours, is, again, crazy. _Precursors and Alternatives to Malari Canon and the Negative Foundations of Ardat-Yakshi Representation in Pre-Spaceflight Thessia_? Even if they didn't think this was just you indulging your sick sister..."

Syane sighs.

"You're not sick. How many, sis?"

"Huh?"

"How many Asari girls have Ardat genes, either two or three clusters? All in and not just the symptomatic cases?"

"Two? One in a hundred. All three? Just over one in twenty-five, for purebloods."

Syane cracks a nutrient bar.

"Sis, that's a dextr-right. Prothean stomach."

"Perks," Syane chuckles. "Can't imagine how Quarians haven't conquered the galaxy," she opines, catching the crumbs in her palm. "I would. Just to make more. These are delicious."

"Fun fact. That's actually twice the number of humans--two percent--who are high enough on the sociopathic scale to perform excellently in combat. Who can take life quickly and without locking up. Not a desirable trait and yet spread evenly in humans. In fact, you'd think more settled, more peaceful societies would have stared to select against people who are comfortable with killing."

"They're young," Artemis chortles. "Give them time."

"Ardat-Yakshi, absent treatment, are either celibate and some sort of miserable or somewhere along a path between the first murder and the last. It's a nasty little trait to be so-well preserved in Asari genetics as a dead-end. Even despite purges and genophagic treatment attempts by post-Malari governments."

"So you're saying some level of Ardatism was allowed, accepted even? For combat purposes?"

"I'm saying it's _so fucking obvious_ that there would have been a place for them that I'm not surprised the Justicars shelved those drawings I found. More I dug, more I realized it was too many scrolls, books and statues to disappear and burning would have drawn attention. Pre-firearms? Pre-implant? If your tribe didn't have an Ardat warrior, feeding at least three or four times a year, the neighboring tribes who were willing to bear that cost would march in and wipe you out without breaking a sweat."

"Maybe they used willing volunteers. Maybe they used prisoners. Maybe they demanded tributes of virgins and these were the ones left over from the volcano. I don't know. That's the next paper I write."

"I only know that physically, a sated Ardat--including one with the treatments to prevent the killing part, like you--who has melded at all recently? She is a fucking force of nature. Now that we have decriminalized it and there are sexually active Ardats, honing the meld over time? We have an inkling of how _much_ more powerful that buzz makes you. Before the amps, they would have been the only _combat_ biotics possible. You blew out three military-grade amps the year after you lost your virginity."

"Two more since the day you met Nyra. You blew out one that dad needed a SPECTRE waiver to get you. Aldrin Labs on Earth makes the Dhampir-XXX model specifically for Ardats now with quad-chambered cores. No model ever needed that sort of redundancy. Because in a full spike, there's a split second where you just _push so much harder_ than other Asari. Because humans are anthropocentric bags of dicks, it comes in crimson and black casing even though they go under the skin, for crying out loud. Comes with a platinum amulet of some lesbian vampire character."

"Please tell me you didn't."

"Solstice present!" 

"The amp or..."

"Both. Me and dad."

"Goddess, I hate you."

"No, you don't."

"No, I don't."

Something makes a scraping sound up ahead. Stone on stone.

A new draft of air, stale and warmer than this chamber.

Breathing.

"Did you hear something?"

Syane nods. Her hand drops to her holstered Acolyte.

"Yeah. Not just a cavehopper, either. Something that reacted to our presence here."

"WHAT? This place has been seale-"

"And lined with huge clumps of moss," Syane reminds her. "Maybe edible."

"And _cold."_

"Someone just thrived for in ten hours in water three Celsius below freezing. Also, in the cold? It's obvious. You're in denial," Syane teases. "You are totally going purple as you finish growing up. Like great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather."

"And _alone._ "

"And _dark_ ," Syane adds. "And if that's who I'm _afraid_ it is, she's been here about forty-one thousand years now. Alone. Probably on the crazy side."

"She?"

"Yeah. Yasseni. Guardian goddess to an extinct local tribe. Except when I translated with more comparisons, I think it's a _title_ and not a divine being. This is that tomb. I think."

"How? This place is way too old. How the fuck is she alive?"

"Joshua Tree Paradox," Syane says with a shrug as if the idea of an ancient Ardat hunting them down was something she needed to make a note on in her next draft.

"What now?"

"On Earth," she whispers. "The only species that lives nearly as long as Krogan, Asari or Protheans are _plants_. Trees, usually. Perfectly self-repairing. Everything else has a pre-programmed death. Joshua Trees are a desert species. Push five thousand years. And they don't get old. They die."

"What's the difference?" Artemis hisses.

Syane's eyes do that strange paired-movement thing she used to do to freak Arty out when they were little. Right and left pairs working independently on either side of her broad face. Her fingers curl around the slender white grip of the Justicar-built pistol.

"The differences is that a tree that can't age will eventually burn, or get trapped in a flood, or heck, get hit by an asteroid because of random chance. Because it had to weather whatever happened in that one spot for so long. An _animal_ like that has no such limit. Runs off. Protects itself. Oldest recorded Krogan, Iylk the Clanless? Seven thousand. Hermit. Just stayed out of trouble. Burned his hut cooking, they say. Or was murdered."

"Asari cells stop changing at the Matriarch phase. But they don't degrade or lose function. Age sickness is mental, not physical. Just more life experience stuffed up there. We live in a culture where people get along. Asari have five times the human biological imperative to reduce social tension, according to human psychiatric studies."

"She probably would have hugged her granddaughter and committed suicide, stopped eating, gone into the woods, whatever. At least in ancient times. If her madness became a risk to the tribe, it wouldn't even be a hard decision. Stop using your body, being active, going out, so on and eventually and you'll die. That's the relief valve. After a certain age even with no physical decay, more effort is needed to get up every morning."

"So you're saying...what? That's an Ardat older than dirtdown here?"

Syane shrugs.

"Safe, enclosed space, moss for food and to replenish air? No distractions from her drive for self-preservation? Lower oxygen needs than a human or Prothean to begin with? Why not? Unless you'd rather it be a new species that can move doors, yeah."

Arty drops her hands to her shotgun. Systems Alliance surplus Claymore Mark XII, even if it is loaded with eezo-infused explosive shot from a Serrice gun shop. She's her father's daughter. 

"So this 'day trip' was to take me to a vampire warrior queen's tomb without telling me."

"It was a fun surprise?" Syane suggests with forced cheer.

She jerks the other Acolyte out of its holder. Arty groans.

"What?"

"Showoff."

"Are you really mad right now that I can aim both? Using two eyes per gun, missy. Same as you. And in my defense, I thought her being alive was _possible_ but not remotely fucking _likely_ because that means this place was built for that purpose. And I doubted an ancient civilization would have noticed the pattern in Asari deaths!" she hisses.

"Later," Arty scolds. "Guns up, sis. Let's make mom and dad proud."

* * *

**Artemis T'Soni | May 2250**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Dig Site, Tescani continental shelf**

(167 meters below sea level)

Arty knows those eyes. 

All black and coated in warpfire, a more even and featureless shade than a maiden's ordinary meld. Utterly flat and without hint as to mood or interest. 

They're _her_ eyes. The eyes of an ardat-yakshi in mid-meld. Mid-feed. She's only seen them in a mirror, one night when Nyra wanted to get a little more adventurous than usual and fuck in the dressing room at the summer manor.

Nyra was safe. Secured behind modern medicine and post-Crucible event synthesis of Asari, Human and even some formerly Reaper nano and picotechnology. Nyra wanted Artemis to see what she saw, she said.

This is not her nibbling on Nyra's neck folds and digging her fingers into her back before a party to celebrate their second anniversary while using some extremely difficult-to-make neural implants to keep everyone alive.

This is the wild, raw, nasty truth that so terrified otherwise libertine cultures that they created a totalitarian religious order to deal with it. The face wears no smile, no pre-orgasmic parting of the lips, no softness or affection of any kind. This is a fuck-only-knows-how old killer acting out an ancient script. Ardat who is untreated, doubtless insane from isolation and who is probably used to being given living victims as sacrifices. 

Who has Arty on her back, gun-hand pinned and who got past Syane's incredible senses. 

Or worse. She went through Syane, her nasty Prothean dark energy powers and ten rounds of stasis-programmed ammo per gun. All velocity and resilience, no explosion. Hits a target dummy like a crashing freighter. Her sister doesn't miss, not at close range.

"Stop!" Syane bellows.

"St-o-oop," the creature sounds out, working the word in her mouth.

It's judgy of her but this one she doesn't exactly give off a thinking-being vibe right now. Syane limps into view, seemingly intact but nursing her left leg.

"Kin," Syane tells the creature. "My kin," she adds, tapping her chest.

Arty has a bare-assed guess what happened to make those broad gashes in her sister's wetsuit but this really isn't the time.

"Kin?" the creature murmurs.

"Is that?"

"Yup."

"Yasseni?"

"The same."

"Sy, why are you sort of _randomly_ one-third naked?"

"The suit? That was an accident."

"Why is she doing what you say? For that matter, how is she understanding what you say?"

"That is _less_ of an accident. I pulled her off you before she got started and pushed my memories into her while she tried to feed on me, hoping she'd chill the fuck out and see you like I saw you. Friendly and harmless. She switched into a more traditional, sexy-type meld, things got a bit heated while I distracted and got into a chokehold. She even got a bit of galactic standard off of it. Not much."

" _Tried to feed_? You let her fuck you? Rape you? Are you all right?"

"Fine," Syane huffs. "She didn't actually hurt me, Arty. She just got frisky and it really didn't go far. Not sure I'd know how if she had tried to make it sex. Not like we have any erotic texts in Prothean. I must have parts but fuck knows which are the sexy ones let alone they all do. For all I know, sex for me is like stubbing your toe is for you."

"So I'm right about the Prothean thing, Sy. Some sort of resistance feedback between Prothean sense-sharing and memory lifts and the Asari meld. Thank the Goddess. I feel wy less gross now."

Syane nods.

"Yas, let her go."

"Worthy," Yas repeats. "Mate kin. Go."

Goddess of Miracles, but she does let her go. Syane's hand shoots out and she hauls Arty up.

"Yas? Really?"

Syane flexes her right hand over and over, balling a fist and then dropping it.

"Fuck. That was intense. I'm still piecing together who's who of the memories. Lots of temples, servants, wine. Music. I'm actually pretty sure some of them are mine, blocked by the injury before stasis. It's like my mind was taken out, shaken, warmed up, spit-shined and then put back in. I think that stupid ringing in my ear I've had since third year got knocked loose. I'm starting to see why Melanie went to that club the day of legalization."

Syane shakes her head vigorously and Yasseni snaps up, watching her.

"How is Nyra still _sane_ , alive or not?"

"Do not say that right now!" Arty groans. "You are not allowed to smile about this, Sy! No!"

"I'm just saying! Damn!"

"Fuck you."

* * *

**Artemis T'Soni | May 2250**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

Shep's head is down on the dining room table at her end.

"You what?"

Liara rubs her back. She has been grinning like a fool since Arty relayed the basics. That's not her mom, right now. That's Professor Emeritus Liara T'Soni, head of The University of Serrice Xenoarcheology and Xenocultural studies department. The research board's version of an apex predator.

"She found an Ardat-Yakshi matriarch, dear. It's fine. Second Nomadic era, so bit older than your average matriarch but still."

"Older?" Shepard croaks. "Older? Twelve hundred and three is a bit older. Predates end of the last ice age on Earth? Proves a long-shot theory about Asari aging? That's more than just a 'bit' older."

Liara ignores her wife's freakout.

"Underwater tomb, you said?"

"Yeah, mom. Old Justicar archive writings that predate the Malari Canon. Syane lined it up them with post-war seismic scans from the cleanup. We think maybe the upper entrance was above the waterline before."

"Fascinating."

"Can we get back to the part about the age-old lunatic _attacking_ our little ones?" Shepard groans. "Forcing herself on them? I have nightmares about Mornith, sometimes and not the fight. The almost-happened bit. And I went after _her._ "

"Darling," Liara coos. "I'm sorry. Tell me this next time so I won't make fun."

"S'not very warlike of me," Shep groans.

Shep sits up suddenly.

"What did you do with her?"

Arty blows out a long breath.

"Syane! This one is so fucking _your problem."_

"Hi, mom. Dad. It's cool. She's heavily sedated. I have one of those at-home autosurgery suites on order and Aunty Aria scored one of the Ardat blockers for me. Going to just do the implantation here rather than risk it or make a fuss. Oh!"

She's practically wiggling in her seat.

"I have tons of questions about the old Prothean stuff from where I was found, too."

"Any time darling," Liara mumbles. "in fac-wait. Syane. Why are your eyes _dark_ like that? It's almost like you're post-meld...but no offense dear, but..."

"Not Asari, so I've heard. Sometimes I'm disappointed too."

"Never disappointed in you sweetie, in either of you. Those are what your father's eyes look like...not me."

Shep's beetle-green eyes narrow. Eyes that have lined up a thousand impossible rifle shots across a battlefield. 

"And why in all that's good and holy are you _sweaty_ , young lady?" She growls.

Arty slaps Syane's shoulder and goes to grab her jacket.

"Have fun, sis. I'm going out with Nyra, you're dealing with...all that. You fucking deserve it after the day you put me through yesterday."

* * *

**Syane-Tav T'Soni | May 2250**

**Thessia (Asari homeworld) | Armali city-state**

**Armali University | Silver Wind Dormitory Complex | Room 1837**

"I'm what now?" Syane mumbles. Her head feels hollow. With Yas in the other room, doped to the neck folds and being carefully examined by a quarantine-suited Karin Chawkas, she can't blame sharing her mind with a nymphomaniac for it.

"Bare minimum, you're noble. We pretty much knew that. Four hundred and nineteen pods were below you in fail-priority and two were tied. In your new memories, you said the walls were yellow?" Liara prods. "With this symbol?"

She taps the sketch.

"Yeah. Rough circle with a hook-shaped blade inside. Red paint, I think."

Liara sighs.

"That's a House Atredio symbol. The dynasty who ruled at the end. Give me ten minutes. I have to write something on the dark exonet. Call you back."

\-----

"This is my fault, little one. You don't remember the war and I wanted to spare you the awfulness all the other survivors went through. I taught you about it like it was written history, not a different culture. Partly because of the fact that what I hoped were citizen scholars were in fact a slave-based, luxury economy of idle tyrants ruled by force of arms and paid for by tributes? It disgusted me. I wanted you to have my values, not the Empire's."

"I'm not loving the good manners of pre-freeze me as I remember her, mother. So mission accomplished."

Mostly, to protect you from discovering how awful it was or seeking out other survivors. We spaced each thawing out by days so that your father could recover. Back then, I hadn't been able to meld the Codex out of her. Drove me mad with jealousy that I couldn't understand their subliminally-rooted, always-shifting languages."

"She re-lived whatever they personally experienced or lifted from loved ones. During the tail end of systematic genocide."

"So what am _I_ remembering?"

"Palace barracks," her mother sighs. "From the fittings, it's the necropolis next in the chain of Resurgence Project bunkers from where we found you. A protected life in the middle of pure hell. Kept content as long as could be managed, then stored away for safekeeping."

"So I'm a soldier? I remember training."

"You said there were women, non-combatants?"

Syane shakes her head, trying to plug a dam in her mind that holds the flood. The worst of the worst of her unburied memories.

"Two, if I recall. My age, I'm guessing. Not like we know that much about Prothean puberty."

"Were their flares flexible? If you can recall."

Syane blows out a long breath.

"Think so, I remember playing a game. Some sort of dart tossing. I won and she let me touch them. They were soft, still dry. Like mine, when you found me."

Liara reaches for her datapad and hastily types something in.

"Hmm. Early pubescence. Matched to your age when we thawed you. Not the guards you described. Sounds more like they were harem girls, not soldiers. From the Age of Splendor on, writings of prisoners and rebels suggest females were aggressively dominant, almost as bad worst of modern human sexists. To have female sex slaves at your disposal? Darling, I think you may have been much higher born than I thought. Or rather, than I feared. If anyone has the bloodline, signal genes and legal claim to be empress, it's you, daughter."

Liara groans. "Goddess. I have to write the other survivors before this spirals into an actual insurrection. Not enough ryncol in the galaxy."

"I'm sending you a file. Prothean erotic text. Take it with a full glass of salt, not just a pinch. Neither a medical explanation or a self-help text. Emulate the heroine's behavior and I disown you."

"The _Moons of Janere_?" Syane asks, reading the file. "Janere..."

"The ancient name for the asari festival, yes. The science team was siloed, their findings masked from each other. Hundreds. Split into one group per continent and basic ecosystem type. The polar-zone team became rank hedonists. Engaged in local fertility rites, kept harems of dozens. Prisoner pens with far more. They killed fewer in their labs, to be fair. Mostly criminals surrendered by the local chieftainess for mere convenience and often in asari-witnessed executions."

Syane opens the file and hits the random page button several times.

"Well..." she mumbles, swallowing with a fast-closing throat. "This, ah..."

"That is the collected and dramatized diary of a petty warlord that the Empress tolerated simply because her research results intrigued. Especially those about Ardats, professional huntresses--back then, literally hunting for game--and Matriarch stage individuals. Caetva was one of the junior researchers on the Thessian project to modify ancient asari. One day, she killed her supervisor and took it over. It's the only firsthand account, or anything like it, that I have that isn't just walls of DNA-RNA interlocks and clinical notes."

"Why didn't you give me this sooner, mother?"

"Besides the fact that it's a lurid journal of someone's sexual uses for--and _abuse of--_ my species?"

"Besides that, yes. That, I understand."

"Well, I haven't slept in six days re-translating it," Liara admits with a cavernous, languid yawn. "That's reason number one. I doubled down when you found Yasseni. Page 319, darling. Read it aloud, please."

> _"This blaze-maiden, Shora, was worn in comparison to the others. Her channel was warm, the grip powerful. Her mind and body had been eroded from a life of killing."_
> 
> _"Whether battle or ravishings, she bore scars nearly as numerous as mine own. But ancestors, she was eager. Feral. A beast among beasts."_
> 
> _"Made to be broken, to be tamed. To be bred. Had I known what a rarity she was, how great a gift the chieftainess made, I might've spared her tribe however weak they were. Raised them to rule the others."_
> 
> _"Shora didn't allow me, she craved me. I didn't take long before I denied any others anything but a quick shake of my frond in their throats before I ate, fed, and hurried through work so I could take Shora again. Shora was endearing. They were relieving."_
> 
> _"I've gone native, I know this. But to see her belly, round and hard as a sandstone orb? To have her place her babe in my arms without a shred of concern or reservation? I could not help it. I hid the baby. Someday, I will be executed for that."_
> 
> _"Love and family makes animals of the best of us."_

"The next nine hundred pages are foaha tree sap, their love affair is so overwrought."

Liara flicks her fingers in a quotation mark gesture around the word love.

"I'm inclined to believe if only because no self-respecting Protehan woman would have written that about a lesser species unless it were true. About a lab animal, for Goddess' sake. The worst of the _Blood of Old Malari_ historical romance novels cannot compare. Best I can determine, blaze-maiden was their term for Ardat-Yakshis," Liara says with a smile. "Probably after the bioluminescence flare they exhibit, earlier in the sexual encounters and continuous. More powerful than non-Ardats."

"Much preferred among both voluntary lovers and slaves they took and some tribes were glad to give them up."

"Her _baby_ ," Syane mutters. "She conceived?"

"After an orgy lasting nine days and after glutting Shora with fatal feeds of by my count, forty-one prisoners. At least then, Ardats were not infertile so much as _extremely_ resistant to conception. Probably because fatal melds don't exactly encourage empathy or emotional twining so central to the deep reach we use to map and conceive."

Syane rubs her flare with her hands.

"You didn't want to get Arty's hopes up."

"I doubt your sister wants biological kids that but until I can establish she can have them, even after multiple attempts to scrub Ardats with viruses? And have it safely? With Nyra? They're _sickeningly_ cute by the way. Every morning I expect to see the application for early marriage and a flood of shrill, panicky notes from the Peeresses. Every morning a tale about finding a pencil in the covers or a schematic under her tea."

Syane chuckles.

"Until then, I'll protect my baby from the hope. Javik taught me that, ironically. While I was still reeling from watching Serrice burn, watching those monsters crack the towers and take the citizens of my adopted city. When for the first time, Shepard and I fled, not just a tactical retreat. Serrice is thirty-five kilometers from the vacation estate. The one without servants quarters, just spaces for them to visit. Where I was conceived, born, raised most of my girlhood. He told me 'Despair is the enemy's greatest weapon. Don't let them wield it.' The way not to despair is not to hope."

"I assume you understand what she means by her 'frond', darling?" Liara teases.

"I have a guess. And ah...I can imagine her...ah...interest in that activity."

Liara hums.

"May I merely get a yes-no on whether the Protheans were dual gendered: males and hermaphroditic females? No details, I beg you. I simply am curious since I only have clues in the gender-sensitive languages. It's 'he' and something more like 'us' or 'we' in the nouns."

"Ah, yes. That seems, ah...likely."

"So you _do blush,_ miracle daughter of mine. Seems Yasseni is good for you."

"I'm learning so many disgusting new things about my biology, the apparent existence of libido and my utter lack of fucking common sense this week," Syane admits.

Liara laughs based on the company. Alone, she chuckles and chortles. With Shepard by her side, she barks and guffaws.

"You're a T'Soni, darling. Your mother made over, I must say. I won't be half surprised if Artemis takes over Omega from T'loak but you, I see professorship or authorship in your future, my dear. An intellectual's life and as your mother, I am glad of it."

"Dad is furious."

"Your dad is panicking because you'd done something so _me_ it made her remember all the times she nearly lost me to my numb-crested curiosity. Most of my nasty surprises on digs weren't on their feet and coming at me but the best is sometimes in the messy digs, not the orderly ones. Out past anyone else, where the novelty makes up for the equipment and difficulty preserving a site."

There's a three-knock sequence behind her at the bathroom door. Chakwas waits, then opens it. The woman every last hair is white, though it's still thick and glossy for a hundred fifty-two. Retired, at last.

"What's the prognosis, doctor?" Liara asks through the link.

"Healthy as a varren, if I'm frank. She must have learned to cook the moss somehow, chemically I assume since smoke would have filled the place. No signs of long-term bacteria load. Caught protein somewhere to vary her diet. She eats like she's in starvation recovery and is averse to sleep. Not sure I blame her. Probably afraid it's a dream. Recovering rapidly from the depression of isolation, to be expected given that she coped so long without hurting herself."

Chakwas laughs.

"Syane, you'll be glad to know that she took the blocker implant like it belonged in her all along."

"Ah...I...thank you."

"You were running out of gloves and prophylatics weren't you?" Karin teases.

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads.

"She also kept spouting nonsense I couldn't parse. Same word kept coming up, about three words out of five. Particularly when something agitated her."

"My name," Syane realizes. 

"Anything else?"

"Unusually thin but dense bones, especially in the abdomen and ribcage. Muscles of someone who did martial arts most of the day, for most of her life. Curiously, I think that ancient hox genes must have been used for the Unity virus. Doubt they are ardat-specific but still. Interesting to find them."

"The what virus?"

Chakwas chuckles.

"Before your time, dear. Government-funded treatment after encountering the salarians. The dalatrass donated armies of doctors to it. Immunity boosts, artificial addition of what in humans would be immune system memory and command and control cells. Skeletal changes, loss of vestigial bones. Massive enlargement of some parts of the reproductive system, thickening of suspending tendons in others. Fivefold increase in the flinch reflex of the birth canal's flap, tenfold increase in lubrication gland output. Wholesale addition of new sphincters to block the intestines off. So on, so on."

"We humans launched right into a war after first contact. You lot went through voluntary upgrades so that you went from enough space for two fingers--all you needed for penetrative sex with each other--to where you could take on a bull krogan in full rut and recover in two days. Hundreds of volunteer subjects died getting it right before they pushed it out species-wide."

"Someone in a position of authority wanted you to be ready to fuck phallic males and enjoy it if you ever encountered them. I can only assume the people who started it died of masturbation related injuries when the krogan were discovered."

"Can I not hear my aunt talk about this?" Syane pleads. 

Perhaps if she says it a second time, they won't ignore it.

Chakwas fold her arms and stares her down. This is the woman who confined Shepard herself to bedrest for trifles like gunshot wounds that nicked the spine, after all. Three recorded occasions. A legend among Navy medical recruits.

"Who do you think talked Shepard down, my dear, when she was climbing the station's walls worrying about hurting your mother whatever depravity Liara suggested? Who shushed her when she awoke from drug-induced when your little sisters were about to be born?"

Liara smiles on the link.

"Who do you think stood behind Shepard in the birthing pool as she pulled my daughters into this world, dear?"

"Goddess. I am going to very promptly get very thoroughly drunk this evening."


	2. Changing of the Guard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where an old pirate retires and Krogan regeneration opens some doors for cosmetic surgeons.

**Artemis T'Soni | August 2295**

**Terminus Systems | Omega**

"I don't fucking like it, kids."

Artemis drums her fingers on her beloved, often-rebuilt Claymore. Syane yawns, clacking her fangs.

"Claymore, huh? Alliance blue, even and looks like a surplus stamp. Daddy's little princess, huh?" she teases.

"Whereas four-eyes here has a pair of singularity-slinging dildos strapped to her hips. Bit flashy for my tastes, especially the Justicar's dick shotgun you think I _can't see_ under your jacket. Mother's daughter, I bet."

Syane pulls the white, curvy Acolyte from its holster and turns it in her palm.

"Defrocked Justicar tried to kill my sister," she explains. "Saved me a trip to a weapons dealer."

"Aria," Tevos soothes. "Consider their offer, please? The Council is offering you a full pardon and diplomatic immunity, my love. Shepard and Liara say they've mapped a small pocket past the Omega-4."

"We've sent a _Knight Shade_ class corvette with a drone crew and it has a pre-installed transponder for the relay," Artemis adds, sliding over the chit with the ship's birth and airlock code.

"Anything but that ship or pre-cleared research vessels goes through, it drops into a black hole. Geth drones are taking the derelicts down for parts and building a station for you on the far side. The research crews won't need to go there."

Aria works her jaw back and forth.

"Is there space?" she asks. "For..."

It's as if Aria is so confused that someone could love her, let alone bond with her and Goddess forbid someone wants to raise her children, that she can't get the word 'baby' out of her mouth.

Tevos rests her hand on her bondmate's arm. Aria's hand drops to Tevos' taut, stretched-out belly, and strokes it. Neither seems to have made a conscious choice to move their hands. More like reflex.

_Some pirate lord._

"My love, there's nowhere else safe to retire. Twins are a difficult blessing. They'll need both of our attention."

Jaw set and teeth clenched, T'loak finally relents. She reaches into a hidden pocket in her jacket and produces a small, ancient-looking piece of circuitry. She slides it along the leather of the couch.

"Command codes, from the people who built this place," she explains. "Doesn't do much but it's enough. Still commands the airlocks and the section dividers. Worst case, threaten the mercs with a quick trip to the debris field."

Artemis takes it.

"Thank you."

"I'm going to visit. V-I-fucking-P treatment when I do."

"Naturally," Syane chortles.

Artemis places a hand on the mobster's shoulder.

"And don't worry. There's only one rule on Omega. Don't replace the couch."

"Walk us out, dear?" Tevos coos.

"Gladly."

\-----

Omega is a city built on bones, Liara told them. Bones of asteroids, machines and dead sentients.

The asteroid is unusually tough, the minerals of its shell so hardy that despite it being little more than a ball of solid eezo in a rocky shell, even the Protheans abandoned mining it. Not until a similar rock tore it in two. The rush to mine it lead to the pirate wars that have defined it ever since.

The bottom of the rock is fully mined out and the hardest, uppermost part remains. Not breakable at the surface with existing tools and easier to mine from below. 

After Ceberus' short-lived occupation, Aria relocated the parts of the operation vital to her into the lumpy dome of rock. Not her citizens, naturally, only her reactors, defenses, and most trusted thugs. Her drug markets, black markets, illegal research and clinics, 'flesh markets' which skirt the line between brothel and slavery.

The things that make Aria rich were protected. The rest could burn. The protection of the powerless has never been part of Omega. Omega is where people go who _don't want_ to be part of civilization.

The wrecks of the Cerberus fleet left from the battle vanished before authorities arrived, as useful things are wont to do in lawless places, absorbed into new, tougher spines and reactors and weapons. She may not have a fleet -- just three stolen Cerberus ships -- but cracking the rockiest parts of Omega is a task no fleet is up to. Like the castles of old, it has water, food, and guards. Enough eezo to fuel the machines for millennia.

Purgatory looms head of them, the silhouette of a gyrating maiden projected on a gaudy digital screen hundreds of feet tall. Not much else casts light here in the central district and this is the _good_ part of town. The jagged inner shell of the rock itself is thousands of meters up and the floodlights there are few. The streetlights cast what light there is and every three or four lights, one has been shot out.

"This is like outer Armali," Arty mutters. "If no one ever repainted it."

"More stripper boots though..." her sister jokes.

"Remember our bachelorette party?" Arty shoots back.

"Don't you remember I only married you after you apologized?" Nyra snaps.

Syane nods to a female krogan, practically naked and wearing human-style gladiator sandals. The other krogan around her, mostly males, sneer at her in a curious way.

"Interesting," Syane mutters. "Look at her."

Nyra turns her head.

"She's been _modified_."

The giantess is still scaly and still pale grey in hue and still decorated in ridges and cords of muscle but her skeleton has been adjusted to be fully bipedal. Her back hump has been trimmed, smoothed out and her hips tilted forward and in. A fully decorative arrangement of flesh on her front -- likely two spare livers and four lungs, given Krogan biology -- gives the impression of breasts. The facial and neck plates have been extended head to toe-- probably by removing other plates she was born with -- and arranged like leopard's spots. It looks like she's shined or painted them. The bones have been rearranged around her eyes to make them more prominent, or else the eyes are cloned transplants. Her hands are larger proportionally, closer to a human male's big, broad spread of fingers than a krogan's stubby fists.

Female krogans were already quite different. No tails, no forehead plates. Less hunched over. She looks like a new species. Not simply a large lizardlike human though. The colors of her scaly skin and the massive, wide face and big jaws cannot be masked. She has a muzzle, not the sunk-in jaws of a typical krogan and the enlarged nose and cheekbones give more human look but she isn't fooling anybody.

Maybe not trying to, either. She has legs that face the directions humans do, jointed in the same way. Even on a ten-foot, likely six-hundred-pound frame, she looks _slender_ and almost dainty standing so close to the brick-shaped krogran bouncers.

"She's more like an asari, or a human," Nyra notes. "That can't have been cheap. It must have been painful, she would have regenerated throughout the entire surgery."

"Yep," Syane replies. "Looks like the rumors were true. I'd heard about some wacko trying to use Krogan redundancy to 'carve' like Earth sculptors used to make statues. He was ranting about a similar surgery but for males. But I didn't exactly let him live long enough to give me details. Looks like he had a business partner."

"Why?" Nyra wonders.

Artemis shrugs.

"Whore, I suspect. She could dance but a human could fuck that and she'd actually _notice_ they were inside her and on top of her. Bet she can charge humans a fortune."

Something rattles in the alley behind them and Nyra -- sweet, bookish creature that she is -- panics and flings a warp at what turns out to be a malfunctioning trash bot.

Artemis spreads her own barrier field wider and takes Nyra into it and then into her arms.

"Thank you," she whispers. "For doing this with me."

Nyra huffs.

"I'm an engineer, darling. I rebuild cities. This is just..."

Nyra looks at the half-ruined outpost.

"This will be the first _standing_ pile of rubble I've worked on."

"So," Nyra sighs. "Do we just break into an apartment or..."

Arty taps her omnitool, sliding Aria's command-code chip into the reader and calling up the overlay.

"Penthouses," she says, pointing to a heavily-armored building above Purgatory. "Armored walls, kinetic barriers. Reactors, hydroponics for food _and_ oxygen. life support. Engines. That's odd. Looks like the forward hull of some _very_ old Salarian cruisers, actually. The kind that detached fore and aft hulls in combat."

"Seems appropriately paranoid for Aria," Syane jokes.

Yasseni traces her calloused finger along the inside curve of Syane's flare and all four of Syane's eyes grow wide and the triangular pupils inside swell enough to black them out. The pair of eyes facing her bondmate turn and Syane returns the tickle, her finger wrapped in a disruption field that hisses and sparks against the barrier of Yas' neck folds. Prothean dark energy channeling is not quite biotics nor is it wholly different, much as the meld Yasseni is pushing and the thought-transfer Syane is pushing back are similar but not identical.

 _No wonder the Protheans sought out the ancient Asari,_ Artemis thinks. _With the melds and the pseudo-biotics we would have been similar to them in ways that nothing else was back then._

"Let's eat," Yasseni suggests, the black of melding urges creeping in at the corner of her eyes.


	3. Housewarming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where everyone has families.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is post-war fic after a "synth-destroy" ending. 
> 
> Shepard chose Synthesis (ever the martyr) but the Leviathans, unwilling to let the reapers escape their revenge, overrode the device before it fully detonated. 
> 
> This threw a partially-disintegrated Shepard free of the device and the Crucible fell back to its default mode, destroying all Repairs. 
> 
> The handful of fighters and survivors in in the Sol and Acturus systems received the trans-organic, trans-synthetic upgrade of Synthesis, becoming functionally perfect beings. The Destroy pulse replaced it before the blast could dial any more distant relays than Arcturus meaning that all other systems did not benefit from the Synthesis ending. 
> 
> Medical research is ongoing to try to make the benefits uniform across the galaxy, using blood and tissue samples from what many call "the greenies" after the slow-moving rivers of green nanites that move along eyes lips, and other soft tissue.

**Siobahn O'Connell | August 2295**

**Terminus Systems | Omega**

"Ain't dressed right," the Krogan bouncer grumbles.

"Let me pass."

"Look, you're cute. And yeah, with this green shit, humans your age are still hot. Dress codes for a reason, lady."

He taps a massive finger to the sign that lists banned clothing for the infamous Purgatory nightclub.

Aprons, winter coats and "frumpy shit" are all listed. Depending on how they define frumpy underwear, she's violating all three.

_Not my fault the life support is trying to kill me._

"I'll take off the coat."

"Just go home, change, and come back. You're a local. No charge for skipping line."

"LET ME IN!" 

"No"

"I swear to God, I will hit your quads so hard they'll crack your head plates on the way up, you lettuce-colored ratfucker!"

The bouncer laughs, all thousand pounds of meat and spare organs shaking. He wipes his frothy lips when he's done.

"You're a real starving pyjak, aren't you? Heh. In you go. Oughta be funny."

In the long tunnel of the lobby, there's a batarian -- a rare fucking sight -- lost in blue tits and black eyes while another customer grinds on his lap. The asari is so out of her own head that she doesn't notice Siobahn grabbing the pistol.

_Carnifex. Front half's mangled. Upgrades. It'll do._

When she moved here, this place was called Afterlife. After the invasion, as some fucked-up outreach, the Citadel's squeaky-clean Purgatory franchise bought it out. Still smells like spilled ryncol, the ozone from biotics, asari fluids, and what must be _something_ krogan related. Aria T'Loak was a piece of shit but so was the mayor of Belfast and the mayor of Belfast never explained the rules. Aria did. Living under Aria's boot was simple enough.

So Siobahn did her job, ignored the bribes she was told to, reported the rest and made enough to raise a kid.

Nef.

\-----

The couch. According to an interview with the Talon's Claw, the closest thing this shithole has to a reporter, the couch predates Aria. Purchased from Earth for the explicit reason that a krogan pirate older than dirt could stretch out on it. The reward for its recovery set the elcor merchant up well enough that he hired most of the Blood Pack for security at his store.

Two couples are on it. A pair of asari, and an asari and a four-eyed, triangular-headed _something_ that she doesn't recognize. 

They act like fucking newlyweds, barely able to see past each other's eyes. Half a dozen dancers and whores -- including that amazonian krogan lady who just moved here -- are writing like snakes on the other two wings of the horse-shoe shaped couch.

Getting absolutely nowhere as their doe-eyed masters don't so much as spare them a glance.

One is wearing a golden jacket. Some sort of metallic weave over the white leather number Aria used to wear. 

Must be the new queen. She's clearly Aria's niece or something. Same purple skin, same unusual height but curves that Aria never had, not even in her matriarch years. She sits with a positively tiny asari of the palest blue wearing a goddamned pantsuit, of all things and pouring over something on a datapad.

"Afternoon," the one in the jacket calls out. "That's close enough."

It's in the eyes. The fucking eyes and the fucking teeth. Sharper than they should be. Sharper than the flat, soothing smiles of the other asari.

It's one of those monsters, like the one that seduced Nef and turned her into a shell. Killed her. A monster so awful it took Shepard to kill it.

A flash of light makes her wince.

The one in the pantsuit has a knife to her throat. Black steel, shaped like a pair of rose thorns placed back to back. Shifting and vibrating with energy. The air around it is freezing. There's a similarly painful chill against her upper thigh and a single point of pain -- like a sliver in the finger -- reaching her skin.

"Lose the gun," she whispers. "Warp knife wounds _don't_ close and I hear humans need the contents of their femoral arteries..."

"Nyra?"

"Eezo, Arty. She's got an eezo leak going on and I don't think she was born when the first humans were exposed. She's carrying a gun. Modded gun."

The four-eyed one laughs.

"Remember when we thought protractor over there wouldn't fit in?"

The purple one stands.

"I take it you've heard?"

"Heard what?"

"Omega is mine. Now, you can hand my lady friend the gun, or tell us where to take it from you...or we can ask the large green lady behind you to search for it. Jutra's not used to searching humans yet. New hire and all. Takes _delicacy_ for a krogan to do that safely."

"Right pocket," Siobahn sighs.

"Grizz?"

The turian standing by the stairs cut the zipper out of her coat with a claw. He tugs the gun out of her belt.

"Overcharged Carny. Another one of those jobs from the clippies."

"Bring it here. Then go find me who made it."

"Right, boss. Her?"

The jacketed one drums her fingers on the couch.

"Nyra. C'mere, pet. Bad for the baby for you to get so worked up so early."

With a frustrated grunt, the woman turns from Siobahn but the knives say, hovering in place.

"Move before I tell you, and I flick my fingers and paint the carpet."

She sits down beside what must be her girlfriend, wife, whatever, who throws a leather-clad leg over her lap. With a flick of the fingers, the knives fly back to the seat beside her.

"Care to explain why you brought a gun up here?"

"Monsters like you," Siobahn replies.

She spits on the floor.

There's a tilt of the head and pale blue eyes -- so pale they're almost white -- look her up and down.

"Goddess. You're Nef's mother. My name's Artemis. Have a seat."

The turian behind her gives her a shove.

"I don't suppose it'll mean anything to you but I'm not Morinth. With the new treatments, none of us Ardat-Yakshi are. Thankfully. Also..."

She nudges the small one in the pantsuit. _Nyra, was it?_

"We can have kids now. I"m not crazy about carrying myself, not yet. Research isn't on that. But Nyra can."

Arty nudges the small, pale asari in the pantsuit who has snuck a candy bar and a jar of _raspberry jam?_ out of a pocket and dipped the bar into it which really has no explanation besides lunatic cravings. Hers were worse with Nef.

She snaps her purple fingers and points at Siobahn, then holds up five fingers to the server.

"Whisky?"

"Fine."

"Artemis, Nytra, Syane, and Jasseni," she says, pointing to each of the strangers on the couch.

"Your accent...it's..."

"Got a bit of an Irish tint from ma, yeah."

"Mother of God. You're Artemis _Shepard_."

"Guilty as charged. This is my Nyra, and that's my sister, Syane, and her bondmate Jasseni."

Siobahn's head sinks into her hands.

"Shepard was the only person who cared about my little girl. I almost shot you."

Artemis laughs and it's so rude and so loud that it might as well be a nametag: _Liz Shepard is my mom._

"You'd think that but you'd have had to get through four interlocked barriers, one of which is a Prothean's so fuck knows what even goes through that."

The server -- a turian girl who doesn't make eye contact -- puts the whisky in her hand.

"Thanks, love."

\-----

If the people of Omega didn't believe Artemis Shepard was in charge, surely they did after listening to her fucking atrocious rendition of 'Danny Boy' while Siobahn started belting out 'the Rocky Road to Dublin' without meaning to. No one would be caught singing like that in public if they couldn't take care of themselves.

\-----

Someone must've steered her drunk ass back to her apartment.

Whoever it was put a contract for her services as an accountant on it and there's a paper not next to it about starting a gallery on Omega.

> _Your daugther was the first artist Omega produced in many centuries. What little imagery of her work that I have, from my mother-in-laws recordings, is amazing. If any of Nef's work survives, I want it to open my new exhibit._
> 
> _\- Nyra Iteris T'Soni-Shepard_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "clippies" = derogatory term for Eclipse, a largely asari mercenary company and one of the deadliest non-governmental groups in the galaxy.


End file.
